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their having established numbers of these institutions
for the reception of their members who have become
consumptive.
Great care is taken to diagnose the disease at the
earliest possible moment, and the patient is immediately
sent to the sanatorium, with a good prospect of being
cured in a few months and enabled to return to work.
The societies claim a large saving in their funds
by the adoption of this course. It is better, they find,
to treat a case as soon as it is recognised, even at the
expense of six or eight months in a sanitorium, with
the prospect of having at the end of that time their
member healthy and ready again for work, than to
keep him on their funds for perhaps a year or two
while the disease runs its fatal course. In this latter
case they would have not only expended the funds in
vain and lost their member, but his wife and children,
brought to poverty by the bread winner's long illness,
would be reduced to a condition in which they might
fall an easy prey to infection with the father's disease.
These children, too, in their turn, would prove bad
material from which to recruit future members. So
that by following the plan they have instituted, the
German societies accomplish not only an eminently
humane ideal but one that is also of high economic
value.
There is a proposal on foot to establish a Sanatorium
for Middlesex, to be run on municipal lines.
Such an institution would be of immense benefit
to this district as well as to the county at large, and